o1mnikent

A thriller in ten chapters – Guardian
The market for the printed book is now global; the opportunities for the digital book are almost unimaginable. To be a writer in the English language today is to be one of the luckiest people alive.

Can Money Buy Happiness? – The American
Money doesn’t buy happiness. Your parents told you this, and so did your priest. Still, if you’re like me, you would just as soon see for yourself if money buys happiness. People throughout history have insisted on striving to get ahead in spite of the well-worn axiom. America as a nation has struggled and striven all the way to the top of the world economic pyramid. Are we suffering from some sort of collective delusion, or is it possible that money truly does buy at least a certain amount of happiness?

The Last Bite: Is the world’s food system collapsing? – New Yorker
Malthus could not have imagined that demand might increase catastrophically even where populations were static or falling. The problem is not just the number of mouths to feed; it’s the quantity of food that each mouth consumes when there are no natural constraints. As the world becomes richer, people eat too much, and too much of the wrong things—above all, meat. Since it takes on average four pounds of grain to make a single pound of meat, Roberts writes, “meatier diets also geometrically increase overall food demands” even in those parts of Europe and North America where fertility rates are low. Malthus knew that some people were more “frugal” than others, but he hugely underestimated the capacity of ordinary human beings to keep eating. Even now, there is no over-all food shortage when measured by global subsistence needs. Despite the current food crisis, last year’s worldwide grain harvest was colossal, five per cent above the previous year’s. We are not yet living on Cormac McCarthy’s scorched earth. Yet demand is increasing ever faster. As of 2006, there were eight hundred million people on the planet who were hungry, but they were outnumbered by the billion who were overweight. Our current food predicament resembles a Malthusian scenario—misery and famine—but one largely created by overproduction rather than underproduction. Our ability to produce vastly too many calories for our basic needs has skewed the concept of demand, and generated a wildly dysfunctional market.

Calvin originally wrote the Institutes in two languages–Latin for scholars and French for non-scholars. Unfortunately, the standard English translation is, at present, accessible only to scholars and even then, barely so.

Christian, Nathan, and the folks at CCEL have begun a translation that recovers Calvin’s original intent for the French version: that it be accessible for everyone.

Here are the first two paragraphs:

Almost all the things we know—the good things, the true things—center on two kinds of knowledge: What we know about God, and what we know about ourselves. There’s a lot of common ground between the two, and it’s difficult at first glance to say which one comes first.

On one hand, I’d like to start by suggesting that we can’t think about ourselves without also thinking about God—in whom the book of Acts says we “live and move.” Obviously, all the life and movement we’re born with don’t come from us – in fact, there’s nothing about us that doesn’t fully depend on God.

Modes of philosophizing
Should philosophy have something to say to non-philosophers? Should philosophy be pursued only by those trained in philosophy? Should academic teachers of philosophy consider themselves philosophers in virtue of the fact that they teach philosophy? And should analytic philosophers deny that continental philosophers are philosophers at all, or acknowledge that they represent different modes of philosophizing? Cogito poses some big questions to four prominent British and US philosophers.

The Future of Reading
The true promise of the Kindle, and its inevitable descendants, is in creating a product that goes where the book cannot. Printed text is fundamentally limited. Once on the page, nothing more can be done with it. With digital text, everything is a draft, to be edited, altered, broadened, remixed, and redirected. As better conveyors of electronic text are developed, the big question is how content itself will change to take advantage of the new opportunities.

all streets | ben fry

Fair Play for False Prophets – Washington Post
It’s worth pondering why white, right-wing preachers who make ridiculous and sometimes shameful statements usually emerge with their influence intact.

Can democracy save the planet? – Open Democracy
Is democracy necessary for sustainable development – or does it get in the way? The political world is full of evidence that can be used to argue for either view. The lengthy and lively United States presidential competition between Senators Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama has, for example, engaged an unusually high proportion of citizens in debating some of the great issues of the day; it also offers the unprecedented and hopeful spectacle of all three candidates for the presidency acknowledging the vital importance of global climate change. At the same time, the character of much of the campaign has so far been conducted – the huge amounts of money involved, the point-scoring, the attack ads, the media concentration on stray remarks and surface details – highlights the way that modern democratic conduct can ignore environmental issues at the very moment when they should be central to the debate.

There is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget.

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off.

(I’ve been to roughly a dozen Seattle Mariners games in my lifetime. During each game, the number of fans in attendance is announced. In 1988—the first game I attended—24,612 fans were present. My grandpa told me he’d ask me to repeat that number in ten years. I did. And I can still repeat it nearly twenty years later.)